'George Thomas and Ethel May in Saskatoon', by Robert Hughes

George Thomas went to Canada in 1920 in the hope of a better life.

He had been a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Walsall in the West Midlands of England according to the 1911 UK census, and there are letters from the time when he was serving in the Army in India, (dated in the late 1890s).

He married Ethel May Morris in 1906, and their only known child was George Albert, born in 1915 in Coventry. Elsewhere on this blog is an account of George Albert's tragic participation in the Spanish Civil War: he was 'missing in action' on the memorial of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, which in the context of that war means he was killed.

Above is the obituary notice for Ethel May Thomas, inserted in the Star Phoenix newspaper of Saskatoon by relatives or friends, which tells us that she died on February 16th 1971.

She had been a matron at the YMCA for 37 years until her retirement in 1958, which means she took the post very soon after arriving in Canada. They had first gone to Wolseley, Saskatchewan, to join George's brother Frank, and it could even have been Ethel May's appointment which took them into the big town of Saskatoon.

Ethel May Morris was born at Holt, Wiltshire. Her father was born at Farleigh Hungerford, and at her birth he was a gardener on a large estate in the area. Ethel May started her working life as a housemaid, (1901 census), and later went to work in the Midlands where she met and married Samuel Thomas, who was by that time universally known as George, (but not on his marriage certificate of course). Samuel bore the name of his father (Samuel Thomas 1835-1912), and grandfather (Samuel Thomas 1807-1878); so it is easy to imagine why, for the sake of simplicity, he was accorded a different forename! 'George' was so fashionable then anyway: students of the Thomas family tree will see that Lilas Thomas (c.1868-1949) married a William Warwick, but he also preferred to be called George!

George Thomas predeceased Ethel May and died on 18th February 1946, when he would have been 73: a respectable age but not approaching that of his siblings Irza, who died at 92; Francis (Frank), who is said to have died at over 90 although this is as yet unconfirmed; Rosa (later known as Rose) who made it to 93 albeit having had 57 years in mental hospitals; Florence who died at 92; and Newton who died just nine days short of his 92nd birthday.

Many another woman would have crumpled under the weight of the loss of her husband and her only son, but Ethel May continued to work as Matron of the YMCA for twelve more years, and even after retirement she was active in fund-raising, bowling, and as a member of St John's Cathedral in the city.

She and George are buried in grave 99-L108-N1/2 in Saskatoon's Woodlawn Cemetery.

George Albert Thomas, by Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes, the great-nephew of the writer Lionel Britton, continues to throw light on his family history, this time concerning the Spanish Civil War.

George Albert Thomas was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, 25 Feb 1915, and was previously mentioned in this blog in an entry dated 17 November 2008, which described how his parents brought him to Saskatchewan, Canada.

His father was George Thomas, b. 1873 in Billancourt, Paris, to Samuel Thomas and his Belgian wife Marie-Antoinette (née Goffin).

His mother was Ethel May Thomas (née Morris), b. 1884 in Holt, Wiltshire, England, to Albert William Morris, a gardener on a big estate, and his wife Mary Ann (née Fisher).

Initially George and Ethel May went to Wolseley, where George’s brother Frank had already established himself as a nurseryman. Forestry was very big in the province at that time and Frank seems to have found employment planting trees, but George, the father of George Albert, seems to have been more of a mechanic, and eventually gravitated to the larger city of Saskatoon.

George Albert clearly joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and fought in the Civil War in Spain, where he died - details here.

Under the heading of ‘The Volunteers’ we can see there is only one George Thomas and that he is listed as Missing in Action, which in the context of that war meant he is almost bound to have been killed. (See any number of sources about the Spanish Civil War, which amply confirm that foreign ‘irregulars’ were not given Prisoner of War status, and therefore summararily executed.)

It is worth speculating about a radical streak in the Thomas family: in this guy it manifested itself in an urge to fight and die for a quixotic cause, and in the case of Lionel Britton a determination not to be sent out to die for any cause. (He was a conscientious objector in World War I.)

George Albert has a significant physical resemblance to his grandmother Marie-Antoinette, see photo below. Put him in drag and grey his hair and you would never know.


This lad will have gone to give his life for something he believed in, but to me as a cousin of his it seems a tragedy.

Wolseley, Saskatchewan, and George Albert Thomas

Robert Hughes continues to excavate his past. He writes:

'Wolseley, in Canada's prairie province of Saskatchewan, had a population of something over a thousand in 1916, and was growing rapidly as migrants flooded into the West: two of them my great-great-uncles George and Frank Thomas.

Frank Thomas, born in 1876, arrived in Canada with his wife and two boys in 1911, and by 1916 was established in Wolseley working as a nurseryman in forestry.

George Thomas was officially Samuel, like his father and grandfather, but presumably things had become too complicated when his father could not shake off the "Sam Thomas Junior" handle, and so this young fellow became George.

By 6th March 1920, when he arrived in Saint John, New Brunswick, on the ship "Scandinavian", he was no longer Samuel but also no longer young; proposing to make a new life farming in Saskatchewan at nearly 48 years of age.

In 1906 he had married Ethel May Morris, who had been brought up near Frome in East Somerset, the daughter of a gardener on a large estate; and who was later known by the family as Aunty May.

Ethel May followed her husband across the Atlantic a month later, landing at Halifax, Nova Scotia from the 'Carmania' on 5th April 1920. With her was a five-year old boy called George.

We had thought that there may well have been no children of the marriage between George and Ethel May, but we were wrong: this child turns out to have been George Albert Thomas born Coventry, Warwickshire, on 25th Feb 1915, their son.

My cousin David Guillaume now remembers an occasion, soon after the Second World War, when Aunty May was showing some photographs to his Aunt Louise at her flat in Alcester. He remembers the expression: “he was already in the air force when the war started”.

This was very likely to have been George Albert Thomas, and as I can find no record of him being a casualty, he is quite likely to have survived the war, although that is not certain, and we all know how high was the attrition rate among airmen.

Of Frank Thomas' sons, we know what happened to Cecil, (born 1905): he had no children of his own, but adopted Jason in 1964; eventually dying aged around ninety.

Samuel Francis Thomas, already known as Frank by the 1916 census of Saskatchewan, and born Upper Ipsley, Worcestershire, on 10th Nov 1900, was said to have married the daughter of a pig-farmer, but we do not know if there were any children.

So if we have Canadian cousins out there, descended from either Frank, (Samuel Francis), or George Albert, we would love to hear from you!'